Many types of diagrams may contain various elements that may be connected to other elements by relationships. An example may be a Gantt chart or a Unified Modeling Language (UML) sequence diagram. In both types of diagrams, various elements of the diagram may be connected by different types of relationships. For example, a first element may have a dependent relationship on a second element, which may cause the second element to be displayed in series with the first element.
The elements and their relationships with other elements may be defined with various rules. For example, a sequence diagram may be defined such that communications between different elements are shown as horizontal lines. Diagonal lines may not be used within a sequence diagram to show communications, for example.
Diagrams may be used to describe very complex and intricate processes or concepts. As the diagrams become very large, subsets of diagrams may be displayed on a user interface and a user may be able to scroll or pan across various portions of the diagram.